Confirming the industry's worst-kept secret, Valve CEO Gabe Newell has confirmed Valve is working on its 'Steam Box', a Steam-powered HTPC geared towards console-like gaming. It'll most likely run Linux. "Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he told Kotaku. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room." Steam has 50 million subscribers, so there's a market here. As a comparison: Xbox Live has 40 million subscribers.

I don't get you. You seem to want Valve to build a $1000+ gaming rig but sell it for less than a last-gen console. You set the bar so high no one would be able to succeed.

I definitely get the impression that Valve has somehow pissed you off, or that at the very least you don't like Steam or even gaming in general. I'm a casual gamer myself, but I think something unique like this would be a boon to both the console gaming arena and to GNU/Linux itself. I could be wrong of course, but I'm not going to hold the company to an expectation that no one out there, including the established players, could meet.